Syrian Status Updates

When I ask my Egyptian friends “What about Syria?” these days, they shake their heads. “Syria very bad,” they say. “In Syria, anyone is afraid to say anything.” I wish I could talk to my Syrian friends, but I daren’t. When the protests began in Daraa, ten days ago, I Facebooked several people I know who live in Damascus. They wrote back very short replies—“Miss you too,” “Thanks habibite”—but nothing more. One friend, usually a prolific Facebooker, had wiped his entire home page of any information and all posts. Thursday morning, I checked on another friend. She had changed her profile picture to a blank black square and posted:

I am a human being, I have a voice. I am a human being, I have a heart. I am a human being, I have a right to live. I am a human being, I have the right to choose how to live.

I scrolled through our mutual friends and saw several more blank black squares instead of faces. On Wednesday, I watched Bashar al-Assad’s State of the Union (Won’t Change) speech in front of the Syrian parliament. He grinned, glad-handed M.P.s, and raised his hands in a victory greeting to the rent-a-crowd outside waving placards with his face on them. He got into his limousine and his black-suited security guards surrounded it as it began to drive away. CNN was carrying the feed as it was being broadcast on Syrian state TV. Suddenly, a woman appeared on the far right of the screen, running the gauntlet to launch herself at the windshield. The security guards tried to pry her away. The pressing crowd gathered around the stalled Presidential convoy, excited, pushing, shoving, attacking, defending—it wasn’t clear. And then the TV feed stopped, blipped to a blank black screen for a moment, before Syrian TV resumed with a library shot of a tree-filled, calm, and peaceful Damascus square.

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